The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people
#19901
Cecil Williams
#19912
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Albert Cecil Williams is an American pastor, community leader, and author who is the pastor emeritus of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church. Early life One of six children, Williams was born in San Angelo, Texas to Earl Williams Sr. He had four brothers, Earl Jr., Reedy, Claudius "Dusty", Jack and a sister, Johnny.
Go to Profile#19902
Idris Elba
#19913
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Idrissa Akuna Elba is an English actor, rapper, singer, and DJ. An alumnus of the National Youth Music Theatre in London, he is known for roles including Stringer Bell in the HBO series The Wire , DCI John Luther in the BBC One series Luther , and Nelson Mandela in the biographical film Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom . For Luther, he received four nominations each for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor and a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor, winning one of the former.
Go to Profile#19903
Dana Ron
#19914
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Dana Ron Goldreich is a computer scientist, a professor of electrical engineering at the Tel Aviv University, Israel. Prof. Ron is one of the pioneers of research in property testing, and a leading researcher in that area.
Go to Profile#19904
John Carlin
#19915
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
John Carlin is a British journalist and author, who deals with both sports and politics. His book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation, about former South African president Nelson Mandela, is the basis for the 2009 film Invictus.
Go to Profile#19905
Sergey Zagraevsky
#19916
Overall Influence
1964 - 2020 (56 years)
Sergey Zagraevsky was a Russian-Israeli painter, architectural historian, writer and theologian. Biography Zagraevsky was the son of architectural historian Wolfgang Kawelmacher and poet and dramatist Inna Zagraevsky .
Go to Profile#19906
Richard Muth
#19917
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Richard Ferris Muth was an American economist, who is considered to be one of the founders of urban economics . Muth obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1958, with a thesis on non-farm housing demand.
Go to Profile#19907
Eugene Rogan
#19918
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Eugene Lawrence Rogan, is an American historian of the Middle East and North Africa from the late Ottoman era to the present. He is currently Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#19908
George Fernandes
#19919
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
George Mathew Fernandes was an Indian trade unionist, statesman, and journalist, who served as the 22nd Defence Minister of India from 1998 until 2004. He was a member of Lok Sabha for over 30 years, starting from Bombay in 1967 till 2009 mostly representing constituencies from Bihar. He was a key member of the Janata Dal and the founder of the Samata Party, now led by Uday Mandal its President. He held several ministerial portfolios including communication, industry, railways, and defence. In 2020, he was posthumously awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian award.
Go to Profile#19909
Nick Barton
#19920
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Nicholas Hamilton Barton is a British evolutionary biologist. Education Barton was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge where he graduated with a first-class degree in Biological Sciences in 1976 and gained his PhD supervised by Godfrey Hewitt at the University of East Anglia in 1979.
Go to Profile#19910
Cora Du Bois
#19921
Overall Influence
1903 - 1991 (88 years)
Cora Alice Du Bois was an American cultural anthropologist and a key figure in culture and personality studies and in psychological anthropology more generally. She was Samuel Zemurray Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone-Radcliffe Professor at Radcliffe College from 1954. After retirement from Radcliffe, she was Professor-at-large at Cornell University and for one term at the University of California, San Diego .
Go to Profile#19911
Steve Selvin
#19922
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Steve Selvin is an American statistician who is a professor emeritus of biostatistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Selvin joined the faculty of the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley in 1972 and in 1977 he became the head of its biostatistics division. As the head of Undergraduate Management Committee he was instrumental in the development of the school's undergraduate program. In addition to his work at UC Berkeley he also served from 1990 to 1998 as an adjunct professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan and since 2005 as a professor of biostatistics at the John...
Go to Profile#19912
Thomas Bever
#19923
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Thomas G. Bever is a Regent's Professor of Psychology, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience at the University of Arizona. He has been a leading figure in psycholinguistics, focusing on the cognitive and neurological bases of linguistic universals, among other pursuits. Bever received a B.A. in linguistics and psychology from Harvard University in 1961, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967; he studied with Noam Chomsky, George A. Miller, and Jean Piaget. He taught at Rockefeller University from 1967 to 1969, Columbia University from 1...
Go to Profile#19913
Samit Dasgupta
#19924
Overall Influence
Samit Dasgupta is a professor of mathematics at Duke University working in algebraic number theory. Biography Dasgupta graduated from Montgomery Blair High School in 1995 and placed fourth in the 1995 Westinghouse Science Talent Search with a project on Schinzel's hypothesis H. He then attended Harvard University, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1999. In 2004, Dasgupta received a PhD in mathematics from University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Ken Ribet and Henri Darmon.
Go to Profile#19914
Sterling M. McMurrin
#19925
Overall Influence
1914 - 1996 (82 years)
Sterling Moss McMurrin was a liberal Mormon theologian and Philosophy professor at the University of Utah. He served as United States Commissioner of Education in the administration of President John F. Kennedy.
Go to Profile#19915
Blue Balliett
#19926
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Blue Balliett is an American author, who lives with her husband, three children, a grandson, and a cat. She is best known for her award-winning novel for children, Chasing Vermeer. She was born Elizabeth Balliett, but her family started calling her Blue shortly after her birth.
Go to Profile#19916
Joanne Woodward
#19927
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward is a retired American actress. A star since the Golden Age of Hollywood, Woodward made her career breakthrough in the 1950s and earned esteem and respect playing complex women with a characteristic nuance and depth of character. She is one of the first film stars to have an equal presence in television. Her accolades include an Academy Award, three Primetime Emmy Awards, a British Academy Film Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. She is one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema and the oldest livin...
Go to Profile#19917
Agustín García Calvo
#19928
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Agustín García Calvo was a Spanish philologist, philosopher, poet and playwright. Biography García Calvo was born and died in Zamora. He read Classical Philology at Salamanca University, being one of the first students of Spanish philologist Antonio Tovar. He concluded his doctoral dissertation on Ancient prosody and metrics in Madrid at the age of 22. In 1951 he worked as a grammar-school teacher. In 1953 he was appointed to a university chair of Classical Languages in Seville, and he occupied a second chair at Madrid's Universidad Complutense from 1964 to 1965. In 1965 the Franco administ...
Go to Profile#19918
David Simon
#19929
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
David Judah Simon is an American author, journalist, screenwriter, and producer best known for his work on The Wire . He worked for The Baltimore Sun City Desk for twelve years , wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets , and co-wrote The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood with Ed Burns. The former book was the basis for the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street , on which Simon served as a writer and producer. Simon adapted the latter book into the HBO mini-series The Corner .
Go to Profile#19919
Lynn M. LoPucki
#19930
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Lynn M. LoPucki holds professorial positions at both UCLA School of Law as well as Harvard Law School. LoPucki is the Security Pacific Bank Professor of Law at UCLA Law and the Bruce W. Nichols Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law. LoPucki is a nationally recognized expert on bankruptcy and compiled a widely used research database on bankruptcy in the U.S. called Bankruptcy Research Database which forms the basis for a large portion of empirical academic research on bankruptcy.
Go to Profile#19920
Werner Gruner
#19931
Overall Influence
1904 - 1995 (91 years)
Werner Gruner was a small-arms designer, mechanical engineer, university teacher and was rector of the Dresden University of Technology from 1958 to 1961. Life and work before 1945 Gruner was born on June 7, 1904, in the village Terpitzsch, then belonging to the municipality Zschadraß, which since January 1, 2011 is part of the town Colditz on the banks of the Zwickauer Mulde near its confluence with the Freiberger Mulde to form the Mulde 3.5 km north of the town.
Go to Profile#19921
Victor J. Katz
#19932
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Victor Joseph Katz is an American mathematician, historian of mathematics, and teacher known for using the history of mathematics in teaching mathematics. Biography Katz received in 1963 from Princeton University a bachelor's degree and in 1968 from Brandeis University a Ph.D. in mathematics under Maurice Auslander with thesis The Brauer group of a regular local ring. He became at Federal City College an assistant professor and then in 1973 an associate professor and, after the merger of Federal City College into the University of the District of Columbia in 1977, a full professor there in 1980.
Go to Profile#19922
Torkel Franzén
#19933
Overall Influence
1950 - 2006 (56 years)
Torkel Franzén was a Swedish academic. Biography Franzén worked at the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden, in the fields of mathematical logic and computer science. He was known for his work on Gödel's incompleteness theorems and for his contributions to Usenet. He was active in the online science fiction fan community, and even issued his own electronic fanzine Frotz on his fiftieth birthday. He died of bone cancer at age 56.
Go to Profile#19923
Abdullah Ahmad Badawi
#19934
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Tun Abdullah bin Ahmad Badawi is a Malaysian politician who served as the fifth Prime Minister of Malaysia from 2003 to 2009. He was also the sixth president of the United Malays National Organisation , the largest political party in Malaysia, and led the governing Barisan Nasional parliamentary coalition. He is informally known as Pak Lah, Pak meaning 'Uncle' or 'Sir', while Lah is taken from his name 'Abdullah'. He was also a Member of Parliament for Kepala Batas for eight consecutive terms, from 1978 to 2013. During the later part of Abdullah's administration, his government faced criti...
Go to Profile#19924
Karl Z. Morgan
#19935
Overall Influence
1907 - 1999 (92 years)
Karl Ziegler Morgan , was an American physicist who was one of the founders of the field of radiation health physics. He was director of health physics at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from the time in the Manhattan Project late 1940s until his retirement in 1972.
Go to Profile#19925
H. J. Blackham
#19936
Overall Influence
1903 - 2009 (106 years)
Harold John Blackham was a leading British humanist philosopher, writer and educationalist. He has been described as the "progenitor of modern humanism in Britain". Biography Blackham was born in West Bromwich, Staffordshire, on 31 March 1903, to Harriet Mary and Walter Roland Blackham . His siblings were Olive Dingle Blackham , Lorna Langstone Blackham , Sylvia Kerslake Blackham , and Joyce Maude Blackham . Blackham left school following the end of World War I, and became a farm labourer, before gaining a place at Birmingham University to study divinity and history. He acquired a teaching d...
Go to Profile#19926
Michele Alboreto
#19937
Overall Influence
1956 - 2001 (45 years)
Michele Alboreto was an Italian racing driver. He was runner up to Alain Prost in the 1985 Formula One World Championship, as well as winning the 1997 24 Hours of Le Mans and 2001 12 Hours of Sebring sports car races. Alboreto competed in Formula One from until , racing for a number of teams, including five seasons for Ferrari.
Go to Profile#19927
Peter Crouch
#19938
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Peter James Crouch is an English former professional footballer who played as a striker. He was capped 42 times by the England national team between 2005 and 2010, scoring 22 goals for his country during that time, and appearing at two FIFA World Cup tournaments. He is one of 33 players to have scored 100 or more Premier League goals, and holds the record for the most headed goals in Premier League history.
Go to Profile#19928
Elizabeth Spencer
#19939
Overall Influence
1921 - 2019 (98 years)
Elizabeth Spencer was an American writer. Spencer's first novel, Fire in the Morning, was published in 1948. She wrote a total of nine novels, seven collections of short stories, a memoir , and a play . Her novella The Light in the Piazza was adapted for the screen in 1962 and transformed into a Broadway musical of the same name in 2005. She was a five-time recipient of the O. Henry Award for short fiction.
Go to Profile#19929
Janice Radway
#19940
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Janice Radway is an American literary and cultural studies scholar. Education Radway holds a BA from Michigan State University, 1971, and an MA from State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1972. She earned her PhD from Michigan State University 1977 with the dissertation A Phenomenological Theory of Popular and Elite Literature. She taught in the American Civilization Department at the University of Pennsylvania and in the Literature Program at Duke University. She served as an editor of American Quarterly, and, in 1998–99, as president of the American Studies Association. In 2008, she became Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University.
Go to Profile#19930
ASAP Rocky
#19941
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Rakim Athelaston Mayers , known professionally as ASAP Rocky , is an American rapper. Born and raised in Harlem, he embarked on his musical career as a member of the hip hop collective ASAP Mob, from which he adopted his moniker. In August 2011, Rocky's single "Peso" was leaked online and within weeks, began receiving radio airplay. Rocky released his debut mixtape, Live. Love. A$AP later that year to widespread critical acclaim. The project, often considered his breakout record, led to a joint venture record deal with Polo Grounds Music, an imprint of Sony Music's RCA Records.
Go to Profile#19931
Robert Pitofsky
#19942
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Robert Pitofsky was an American lawyer and politician who was the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission of the United States from April 11, 1995, to May 31, 2001. He had previously been Dean of the Georgetown University Law Center from 1983 to 1989, and was Dean Emeritus at the time of his death.
Go to Profile#19932
Colin Farrell
#19943
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Colin James Farrell is an Irish actor. A leading man in blockbusters and independent films since the 2000s, he has received various awards and nominations, including two Golden Globe Awards and a nomination for an Academy Award. The Irish Times named him Ireland's fifth-greatest film actor in 2020, and Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2023.
Go to Profile#19933
Penelope Lively
#19944
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively is a British writer of fiction for both children and adults. Lively has won both the Booker Prize and the Carnegie Medal for British children's books . Children's fiction Lively first achieved success with children's fiction. Her first book, Astercote, was published by Heinemann in 1970. It is a low fantasy novel set in a Cotswolds village and the neighbouring woodland site of a medieval village wiped out by Plague.
Go to Profile#19934
Robert Hewison
#19945
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Robert Alwyn Petrie Hewison is a British cultural historian. He was educated at Bedford School, Ravensbourne College of Art and Design, and Brasenose College, Oxford, where he graduated BA in 1965, MA in 1970, MLitt in 1972, and DLitt in 1989.
Go to Profile#19935
Sandro Galea
#19946
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Sandro Galea is a physician, epidemiologist, and author. He is the Robert A. Knox professor and dean at the Boston University School of Public Health. He is the former Chair of Epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Dr. Galea is past president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research and an elected member of the American Epidemiological Society. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2012, chairing two of the organization's reports on mental health in the military. He formerly served as chair of the New York City Department of Health and Menta...
Go to Profile#19936
Sabaratnam Arulkumaran
#19947
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Sir Sabaratnam Arulkumaran is a Sri Lankan Tamil physician, former president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics, and president-elect of the British Medical Association.
Go to Profile#19937
Vladimir Berkovich
#19948
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Vladimir Berkovich is a mathematician at the Weizmann Institute of Science who introduced Berkovich spaces. His Ph.D. advisor was Yuri I. Manin. Berkovich was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1991-92 and again in the summer of 2000.
Go to Profile#19938
Paddy Nixon
#19949
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Paddy Nixon is a computer scientist and Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Canberra, in Australia. He took up office in April 2020. From July 2015 to January 2021, he was Vice-Chancellor and President of Ulster University and on the board of Universities UK, chair of Universities Ireland and was on the Northern Ireland Council of the Confederation of British Industry. Prior to that he was Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Tasmania.
Go to Profile#19939
Andrew Huang
#19950
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Andrew "bunnie" Huang is an American researcher and hacker, who holds a Ph.D in electrical engineering from MIT and is the author of the freely available 2003 book Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering. As of 2012 he resides in Singapore. Huang is a member of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity, and a resident advisor and mentor to hardware startups at HAX, an early stage hardware accelerator and venture capital firm.
Go to Profile#19940
Nigel Gilbert
#19951
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Geoffrey Nigel Gilbert is a British sociologist and a pioneer in the use of agent-based models in the social sciences. He is the founder and director of the Centre for Research in Social Simulation , author of several books on computational social science, social simulation and social research and past editor of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation , the leading journal in the field.
Go to Profile#19941
Elise M. Boulding
#19952
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
Elise M. Boulding was a Norwegian-born American Quaker sociologist, and author credited as a major contributor to creating the academic discipline of Peace and Conflict Studies. Her holistic, multidimensional approach to peace research sets her apart as an important scholar and activist in multiple fields. Her written works span several decades and range from discussion of family as a foundation for peace, to Quaker spirituality to reinventing the international "global culture". Particularly of note is her emphasis on women and family in the peace process. Boulding was inducted into the Colo...
Go to Profile#19942
Ronald J. Pestritto
#19953
Overall Influence
Ronald J. Pestritto is an American academic. He is the Graduate Dean and Professor of Politics at Hillsdale College, and the author of two books and the editor of five more. Early life Ronald J. Pestritto graduated from Claremont McKenna College with a bachelor of arts degree in government in 1990. He earned a PhD in Political Science from the Claremont Graduate University in 1996.
Go to Profile#19943
Ashok Gadgil
#19954
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Ashok Gadgil Is the Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation Distinguished Chair and Professor of Safe Water and Sanitation at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Faculty Senior Scientist and has served as director of the Energy and Environmental Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Go to Profile#19944
Chris J. L. Doran
#19955
Overall Influence
Chris J. L. Doran is a physicist, Director of Studies in Natural Sciences for Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. He founded Geomerics, and is its Chief Operating Officer. Doran obtained his Ph.D. in 1994 on the topic of Geometric Algebra and its Application to Mathematical Physics. He was an EPSRC Advanced Fellow from 1999 to 2004. In 2004, he became Enterprise Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#19945
Marianne Bertrand
#19956
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Marianne Bertrand is a Belgian economist who currently works as Chris P. Dialynas Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Willard Graham Faculty Scholar at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Bertrand belongs to the world's most prominent labour economists in terms of research, and has been awarded the 2004 Elaine Bennett Research Prize and the 2012 Sherwin Rosen Prize for Outstanding Contributions in the Field of Labor Economics. She is a research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the IZA Institute of Labor Economics.
Go to Profile#19946
Michael Mehaffy
#19957
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Michael West Mehaffy is an urbanist, architectural theorist, urban philosopher, researcher, educator, and executive director of Sustasis Foundation, based in Portland, Oregon, USA. Mehaffy has held teaching and/or research appointments in architecture, urban planning and philosophy at eight graduate institutions in seven countries. He is currently Faculty Associate at Arizona State University. He is the former Director of Education of The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment in London, UK, and advisor to the former Prince of Wales .
Go to Profile#19947
Robert John "Mutt" Lange
#19958
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Robert John "Mutt" Lange is a South African record producer and songwriter, mainly known for his work in rock music as well as his previous marriage to Canadian singer Shania Twain, with whom he co-wrote and produced various songs. Her 1997 album Come On Over, which he produced, is the best-selling country music album, the best-selling studio album by a female act, the best-selling album of the 1990s, and the 9th best-selling album in the United States. He has also produced songs for, or otherwise worked with, artists such as AC/DC, Def Leppard, The Michael Stanley Band, The Boomtown Rats, Fo...
Go to Profile#19948
Thomas Banchoff
#19959
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Thomas Francis Banchoff is an American mathematician specializing in geometry. He is a professor at Brown University, where he has taught since 1967. He is known for his research in differential geometry in three and four dimensions, for his efforts to develop methods of computer graphics in the early 1990s, and most recently for his pioneering work in methods of undergraduate education utilizing online resources.
Go to Profile#19949
William Orbit
#19960
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
William Mark Wainwright , known professionally as William Orbit, is an English musician and record producer who has sold 200 million recordings worldwide of his own work, his production and song-writing work. He is a recipient of multiple Grammy Awards, Ivor Novello Awards and other music industry awards.
Go to Profile#19950
Ay-O
#19961
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Takao Iijima , better known by his art name Ay-O , is a Japanese avant-garde visual and performance artist who has been associated with Fluxus since its international beginnings in the 1960s. Biography
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